LANSING, Mich. (Legal Newsline) - A Michigan True Value hardware store isn’t liable for a tragic accident in which the driver of a U-Haul truck unexpectedly hit the gas pedal and crushed a customer against the wall of the building, an appeals court ruled.
The decision by the Michigan Court of Appeals overturned a trial judge’s ruling that even though the customer couldn’t have predicted what happened, True Value should have foreseen the accident and installed bollards and other barriers to prevent it. In its Feb. 9 decision, the court called the trial judge’s ruling “logically inconsistent” and found any risk of being run over by an errant vehicle was an open and obvious hazard.
Sorin Milhaltan sued over the death of his father, Sorin Mihaltan Sr., after the elder Mihaltan was fatally injured in February 2020 at the Redford Township True Value. Video surveillance footage showed the man parking his car and walking to the entrance on a marked pathway along the side of the store. The pathway was stacked with winter items including pallets of rock salt, so Mihaltan walked along the outer edge of the pathway.
As he passed in front of a U-Haul truck, it began moving forward. Mihaltan veered closer to the store but the truck suddenly lurched forward, trapping him against the building. The driver later said her leg cramped, causing her to hit the gas pedal. He died six weeks later from injuries received in the accident.
True Value sought summary judgment, arguing its parking lot was safely designed and it wasn’t liable for the unforeseeable accident caused by the driver of the U-Haul truck. The plaintiff argued the case wasn’t just about premises liability, but that such an accident was foreseeable given the thousands of similar incidents each year. They also argued True Value was negligent for placing pallets in the walkway to the entrance.
The trial court denied summary judgment in September 2021, ruling the “condition on the land” that led to Mihaltan’s death “was the motor vehicle that crashed into him. An average person with ordinary intelligence would not discover upon casual inspection that an operator of a motor vehicle would lose control of their vehicle in a parking lot and crash into a person.”
True Value should have foreseen this same event, however, the judge ruled, citing research by plaintiff expert Reiter Consultants showing 500 people die each year in similar accidents. Reiter also opined that the pallets and merchandise on the walk “acted as entrapments …preventing any chance of evasion.” Reiter said True Value should have installed safety barriers between the parking lot and the pedestrian walkway.
The Michigan Court of Appeals ordered the case dismissed.
“The trial court’s determination that `an average person with ordinary intelligence would not discover upon casual inspection that an operator of a motor vehicle would lose control of their vehicle in a parking lot and crash into a person’ while at the same time find that a landowner would foresee such event happening is logically inconsistent,” the court wrote.
The trial judge’s reliance on plaintiff expert Reiter’s report also was “problematic,” the appeals court said, since there was no evidence True Value was for should have been familiar with his statistics. As for the negligence complaint, the court said “the pallets had nothing to do with the U-Haul crashing into Mihaltan.”